Two-level communication protocol for a Web operating system (WOS (TM))

The World-Wide Web consists not only of informational, but also computational resources. However; these resources, especially, computational ones are underutilized. One characteristic of the Web is its ever changing structure; for instance, nodes are dynamically added and removed This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to di-aw a complete and accurate picture of available resources. We consider the Web as a versioned system: resources, services and protocols ni-e versioned. This paper presents a two-level protocol within this framework. The first protocol, the WOS Request Protocol (WOSRP), allows to select an appropriate version of a server. The second protocol, the WOS Protocol (WOSP), allows for locating and using these distributed (informational and computational) resources. We show how the latter protocol provides an efficient fault-tolerant resource search mechanism.

, 1998